“The Secretary of Defense is responsible for a half-trillion dollar enterprise that is roughly an order of magnitude larger than any commercial corporation that has ever existed. DoD estimates that business support activities—the Defense Agencies and the business support operations within the Military Departments—comprise 53% of the DoD enterprise.”

This was one of the realities put forward by Dennis Wisnosky, CTO and Chief Architect, Business Mission Area, U.S. Department of Defense, during his Keynote at the 2011 Semantic Technology Conference San Francisco. Mr. Wisnosky was speaking about how the US DoD leverages Semantic Technology across systems to meet the goal of having an “executable, integrated, consumable, solution architecture.” In particular, he spoke about using the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard by OMG for their Business Process Modeling efforts, in conjunction with systems built on RDF, OWL, and SPARQL.

In his keynote, Mr. Wisnosky said, “We hear about not using these words like “SPARQL, and RDF and OWL… well, at the Department of Defense, we’ve taken that head-on. We issued a memo on April 4 saying that every architecture is going to be built this way. I’m talking about the Business Process Architecture itself…and underneath it, they way they are stored.”

He focused on the business process which, although not yet identified by the obligatory TLA (three letter acronym), he referred to as, “‘Model-Data-Implement’ a semantic web pattern designed to field capabilities in 60-90 days; this supports the Department’s goal to move away from monolithic systems that take years to deploy.”

“We’re not at the point of identifying cost benefits yet — savings benefits — although we know they’re there. Being able to spend some time up-front understanding; and then quickly delivering changes. THAT’s what this does.”

Mr. Wisnosky did point out some of the areas of savings. Using these technologies allows for: “People readable Architecture, Machine readable Architecture, Executable Architecture, and Long-term re-use of authoritative data.”

Here is his keynote in its entirety (slides are not available for public distribution).